Another excellent article I've recently read is this Guernica Magazine interview with economist Dambisa Moyo, who explains why sending money to Africa can't bring change. This agrees with my own tentative conclusions based on what I learn from occasional articles by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times and in the New York Review of Books, though Kristof himself, while acknowledging the shortcomings of aid, does not accept that it's part of the problem.

Kristof also reviews Moyo's book in the NYT.The title reminds me that during my all-too-brief visit to Berlin earlier this year, I read Muriel Spark's Aiding and Abetting. It was a good, smooth read, but not as impressive as A Far Cry From Kensington or my favorite-so-far, The Ballad of Peckham Rye.

Ishmael

See also Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. He claims that the main effect of monetary help to third world countries is increasing their population and shifting the balance of food chain further from how many people the country can support. In the opposite model, he presents an "interview" with a traditional tribe. He asks a person of the tribe: "what do you do when there is not enough food?" and the person simply says "we die". Meaning, the population of the people is reduced to accommodate to the reduced food supply, thus obeying the ecological system, instead of overriding and destroying.